Herrsching, Hohenpeißenberg, Wessobrunn, and a REWE

E and I walked a lot this summer. One morning, we walked from Steinebach to Herrsching. Like the walk to Andechs, this walk has become regular enough for us that I didn't take many photos. Here's the most interesting one, a glimpse at how Germany is trouncing the U.S. in environmentally friendly energy.

Solar carport

In Herrsching, we did some essential shopping--breakfast and Gelatine-frei Gummibaerchen--and then hung out along the Ammersee, waiting for S and H to pick us up for our afternoon roadtrip.

The afternoon roadtrip was a compromise. H had been saying for days, "we should really hike the dramatically precipitous trail between Herzogstand and Heimgarten in the Bavarian Alps!" Then she would pause, remembering--"oh, but wait, Liz is afraid of heights. That's really too bad. I guess we can't go." She would say this at breakfast, and then again over afternoon coffee. After dinner, as we discussed plans for the next few days, she'd wax fondly about the razor-thin trail between peaks--"oh, but wait, Liz is afraid of heights. That's really too bad. I guess we can't go." Not one to hold my 95-year-old legally-blind mother-in-law back, I finally declared that YES, if H really wanted to, we would all hike together from Herzogstand to Heimgarten, me included. H was all for it, but inclement weather and insufficient time prevented us from making the trip. Whew.

Instead, we did a leisurely afternoon roadtrip. Our first stop was the pilgrimage church atop the 988 meter high "Mount Parnassus of Bavaria" in Hohenpeißenberg. S, E, and H drove up; I walked up from Peißenberg. As more proof that my camera doesn't do justice to altitude gain, here's a photo looking up up up to the church on the high hill. It looks like it's off in the distance, but it's actually up in the distance. Oh well.

OK, this photo does a better job: see that roof behind the sign, below the road? The hill was steep.

After hiking up and up, with just a little more up to go, I came across some shrooms growing on the trail through the woods.

So that pilgrims heading up to the church don't shock themselves on electric cow fences, someone tied a piece of warning tape on the wire. Underneath was the only way to go.

The view from the top. Those are the Bavarian Alps in the distance. Herzogstand and Heimgarten are in there somewhere.

There are two chapels on top of Peißenberg. The first was built in 1514 and later baroquisiert. The second was added at the beginning of the 17th century to accommodate the pilgrims coming to the first.

Obligatory organ photo. Teeny tiny organ.

After lunch on a terrace overlooking the valley, we headed down and north to Wessobrunn, a former abbey that has most recently been saved thanks to a financial collaboration with a cosmetics company that now occupies the lower floor. An upper floor hallway is open for tours, which we didn't know until we arrived 10 minutes late. We were obliviously not disappointed, but to our good fortune, a groundskeeper spied us from across the parking lot, called to us not to leave, herded us to the abbey, rang the tour guide to let her know she had latecomers, and unlocked the big front door to let us in.

Ca. 1260 Roemerturm says it's ca. 3:10 p.m. Tour started at 3:00--punctually, I'm sure.

The tour paused in a stately room to discuss the long history of the abbey. I was distracted by the dogs chasing animals on the ceiling.

After the tour, we took a quick peek inside the abbey's church.

Obligatory organ photo

A cautionary tale for nuns

On the drive home, we stopped by a REWE to pick up some groceries. It was the biggest supermarket I'd ever seen in Germany, located in a tiny town (Fischen am Ammersee) outside of a bigger town (Pähl am Ammersee, population ~2,500), so clearly a destination grocery store. Its website boasts about its size--over 15,000 articles offered in a 1,200 m² space, with an additional beverage market over 400 m². It was so shockingly big by German grocery store standards that I took a photo.

The REWE entrance--a small fraction of the store

The first time I went to Germany with S, in 1991, folks still went shopping for fruits and veggies at the fruits and veggies store (Gaertnerei Maier), and bread shopping at the bakery (Buchner), and meat shopping at the butcher's (Raabe). When S was a kid, his father also went yeast shopping at the brewery ten kilometers away in Inning, and S and his mom bought flour at the mill in Oberalting (5km), honey and eggs at Sanktjohannser's farm in Auing (1.5km), and milk and butter at the dairy in Steinebach (Eberl). They had to drive to some of these--even nearby Auing--"because they were all in other villages." Then along came the first tentative multi-purpose grocery stores in town, Spar and Das kleine Kaufhaus, and later the chain store Tengelmann, and the mom and pop shops began closing up as mom and pop aged out and their kids had no interest in carrying on the family businesses. Then along came Edeka, an even bigger grocery store on the edge of town, and Tengelmann eventually threw in the towel, long after Spar and Das kleine Kaufhaus had folded. With Edeka came the necessity of doing all of the shopping by car, which makes shopping quite difficult for elderly blind women who can't drive--but then along came the Eismann frozen-foods delivery truck. Steinebach still has a dedicated fruits and veggies store, and the best place to buy eggs is still at the Sanktjohannser farm (which now has an egg-automat out front), but the bakery, butchery, dairy, flour mill, and brewery are gone. The REWE in Fischen could swallow five Steinebach Edekas whole and still have room for more.

Berlinerisch, ick liebe dir

DOLORIS

ICK LIEBE

DIR

When we arrived in Berlin, I found myself unable to understand most of what people were saying. At first I thought I just needed an hour or two to shake off the Bayerisch and get the local accent in my ear, but the problem persisted. Stefan handled speaking and translating, but I was confused. Were people just speaking too quickly for me? Had I forgotten hoch Deutsch? Or was Berlin such an international melting pot that other accents were creeping in?

Soon it hit me. People were speaking Berlin dialect--Berlinerisch. (Yes, yes, I hear you proud regional speakers, "it's a language, not a dialect.")

Thus to a Hugendubel bookstore we marched, in search of both a guide to Berlin and a guide to its dialect.

In Hugendubel, we made our way up to the third floor, where both guidebooks and language books could be found. Stefan went off in search of a WC when a salesperson honed in on me.

"Blah are blah looking blah?" she asked auf Deutsch.

"Umm..." I wasn't confident enough with my German to engage in a conversation with someone I was sure I wouldn't understand, so I said "I'm just looking."

"What blah blah blah looking?" she persisted.

"Umm...Are there books on the dialect of Berlin?" I ventured.

"No. Any books blah Berlin blah in the Berlin section," she said, pointing to the left.

I continued to scan the books on languages. When Stefan returned from the WC, she tried again.

"What book are you looking for?"

Stefan replied that we were looking for a good guidebook to Berlin.

"Berlin guidebooks are over here," she said, pointing again to the section she had already pointed to. "What kind of guidebook do you want?"

"Umm," we said.

"What do you want to do in Berlin?" she prompted. "How long will you be here?"

"Four days; not the typical touristy stuff,"

She handed us her favorite guidebook, then decided if we were only staying for four days, a cheaper one would do. "But really, the best way to see Berlin is with an evening boat tour on the Spree. Good. Do you need any other books?"

"Do you have a book on Berlinerisch?" Stefan asked.

"No. We Do Not Have Any. It would be in the section on Berlin, but We Do Not Have Any."

The next day, Stefan headed to the Technical University to give a talk, Elias went to visit friends for a sleepover, and I went for a long walk with our niece Hanna, who is a horse vet in Berlin. After our walk, she took me to another bookstore, Dussmann, so I could continue the quest for a Berlinerisch book. I had to swoon first over the music scores section, but €120 later, we focused on our primary goal.

The employee we approached at the checkout desk on the first floor at Dussmann was more typical of the German service industry than the employee at Hugendubel. She looked at us, raised an eyebrow, and said "Was." (She probably meant "Was?," but the question mark was too heavy to lift.)

Hanna said auf Deutsch, "My aunt is looking for a book on Berliner--"

"Berlin section. Over there," the woman said, pointing.

"No, not on Berlin, on Berlinerisch," said Hanna.

"Berlin section," she said again, waving us away. "Over there."

We looked in the Berlin section but found only guidebooks, joke books, city maps, souvenir card games, and an umbrella with a map of Berlin printed on the inside.

I felt like I was disobeying the rules when I suggested we go up to the fourth floor to browse the language books. Hanna agreed, but on the escalator she told me that if we couldn't find a book, I'd have to buy the Deutsch/Berlinerisch concentration game to play at dinner.

On the fourth floor, we struck gold. There were dialect books galore: books on Bayerisch, Hessisch, Ruhrdeutsch, Plattdüütsch, Hamburgisch, Wienerisch, Fränkisch, Kölsch, Sächsisch, Schwäbisch, and...wait...what? No Berlinerisch?

No Berlinerisch.

We inquired at an info counter.

"My aunt is looking for a book on Berlinerisch," said Hanna auf Deutsch.

"Berlin section, main floor," the woman said.

"No, not on Berlin, on Berlinerisch," said Hanna.

"Everything we have on Berlin is in the Berlin section."

I jumped in. "Even Berlinerisch? You have Bayerisch, Hessisch, Hamburgisch up here--every other German dialect is in the languages section. Shouldn't Berlinerisch be there too?"

"No. Everything we have on Berlin is in the Berlin section."

Hanna said, "We checked the Berlin section and couldn't find anything."

"If we have it, it's in the Berlin section."

I asked, "Could you, how does one say, 'look it up on the computer'?"

"Oh! Certainly!" She looked on the computer, found two titles, showed us photos of them, and observed they were in stock. Downstairs. In the Berlin section. "Look near the window. Berlin humor is usually near the window."

We headed back downstairs where, at last, we found what we were looking for: Berlinerisch--das Deutsch der Hauptstadt.

Now I understand that in Berlinerisch,

pf -> pp (Apfel -> Appel)
endings -> +e (Bank -> Banke)
ch -> ck (ich -> ick/icke)
k -> ch (Markt -> Marcht)
e -> ö (elf -> ölwe)
i -> ö/ü (Kirche -> Kürsche)
ä -> ee (sägen -> seejen)

The list goes on and on: r tends to get dropped, g tends to be replaced with j and assorted other mutilations, rst turns into hscht, assorted hard sounds become soft and soft sounds become hard.

On top of that, contractions abound. Elias and I couldn't make sense of schwömmnknstje until Stefan explained it as "Schwimmen kannst du, ja?" ("You can swim, right?")

And then there are case shifts. What should be accusative (e.g. mich/dich) becomes dative (e.g. mir/dir), as in ick liebe dir. An example of convenient simplification, or a betrayal of the obsessive precision of German grammar?

In sum, Berlinerisch does a bunch of things I can't catch as they fly by sounding like gibberish. So much to learn and so little time. I guess we'll just have to go back to Berlin.

Faux pas at the Bäckerei

We're back in Germany. The first important thing we did after disembarking yesterday was to visit a bakery in the Munich airport.

Here is photo from another bakery, in Steinebach. I had to take the photo there instead of at the airport, because we had committed a faux pas at MUC.

See that plastic tray on top of the display case, with the advertisement in it? It probably has a special German name--maybe even a word that is also used for something completely unrelated. For now, we'll simply call it a Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschale (cashier's coin-receiving plastic tray), which sounds like a perfectly legitimate German word.

At the airport, while Stefan was picking up the rental car, Elias and I trotted off to buy two Butterbrezen and one Frischkäsebreze mit Schnittlauch. The grand total was €5.20. At first I was worried that I didn't have enough money and would have to run back to Stefan to get some more, but after I counted the coins out on top of the display case (woe! instead of on the Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschale), I breathed a sigh of relief: we had exactly the right amount.

The cashier attempted to remove the coins. She was clearly not practiced in the gauche art of display-case coin removal, presumably having experienced only the refined art of Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschalemünzeentfernung (cashier's coin-receiving plastic tray coin removal), and the consequences were embarrassingly unsanitary. Half of the coins fell, plop, right into the puff-pastries behind the counter, and the cashier glared angrily at the dumb Americans as we made our hasty retreat.

On the bright side, I finally understand why Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschalen were invented, and I will be careful to use them for monetary transactions from here on out.

Update: Stefan said, "try googling Wechselgeldschale." Turns out that's the German word for Kassierersmünzenaufnahmeplastikschale.